Part of Why

[KmH]

The retail photography industry is in decline in part because the middle class in the US is disappearing.
Globalization and automation may be major causal factors.

For whites across America, deaths of despair are rising

 

[KmH]

• Amazon can't take photos for retail photography customers with the camera gear they sell.
• Fewer & fewer middle class Americans can afford to pay someone else to make high quality photos for them - even if they have a college degree.

Most new retail photographers offer pricing that has no hope of keeping a retail photography business alive without the retail photography business being supported with other income - like a full time 'day' job.
In other words, many of today's retail photographers pay their customers to let the photographer make photos for the customer.
The few $$$s the customer chips in does limit how much the photographer pays the customer.

 

[denada]

sorry, deleted my post while you were making yours. and upon your reply see i misread your initial post anyway.

 

[KmH]

Walmart's latest move confirms the death of the American middle class as we know it

(empasis added) The addition of more "upscale" merchandise demonstrates the changes that the discount retailer has been forced to make as the number of potential middle-class customers plummet. Between 2000 and 2014, middle-class populations decreased in 95% of the 229 metropolitan areas reviewed in a Pew Research Center study.

Notice the irony in that Walmart grew to be the giant retailer it is by selling to the middle class while at the same time causing the middle class to start disappearing.
IMO, this shift marks the beginning of the end of Walmart.

I've been saying it for years - to have a viable and ongoing business retail photographers need to promote/market/advertise to the 15% of the people that have 85% of the money. Retail photography should be promoted/marketed/advertised and priced as the luxury item it is, not as a commodity like bushels of corn.

Put another way, most retail photographers can't stay in business selling their products and services at prices most retail photographers can afford.